I agree.
There’s a long term care problem, it’s getting bigger, and this is someone(s) trying to do something. There are flaws in the implementation, some of which are inevitable given WA’s stupid tax structure, some of which are just bad design. It’s on hold - hopefully it gets reworked rather than killed, because doing nothing is going to be more costly and more damaging than this.
The secret is that programs like social security, were designed so that working-age people would pay retirement-age people not to compete with them in the workforce.
According to one of the last emails from our company’s insurance brokerage, this may no longer be true. Olympia was talking about having to provide proof of continued coverage every year. It was the first anyone, including the broker, had heard about it.
Everything is in flux. I guess I’ll wait to see how it shakes out before I cancel. I honestly don’t mind the tax, as one who can afford it, and I’m only a few years away from retirement. But it’s a terrible program with almost useless benefits and a lot of unfairness in the way it operates.
That is definitely not what Social Security was designed for. Social Security was designed to solve a real problem; lots of older people were very poor and could not survive on their meager savings. And it was a pretty good solution. Social Security is a good program!
But it’s also, like most major social safety net programs, a massive wealth transfer from the young to the old.
I’m in exactly the same boat. I have trouble understanding how it could have gotten as far as it did without anyone noticing the problems and ramifications.
ETA: I found the relevant info from our insurance brokerage email re Inslee’s announcement on 12/17 :
And now it’s been postponed until July 2023.
My officemates are trying to figure out whether to cancel their private insurance they just signed up for until next year…
OK I was exaggerating. A big part (however not the entire reason) for social security and similar programs is that if people are able to retire when they get old, it helps people at working age. Working age people paying into these programs aren’t getting nothing out of them prior to retirement age. And that is a huge reason why social security was initially implemented in the great depression.
It’s more than that, they have also expanded the ways in which you will be eligible to opt out.
You can be eligible if you fall under any of these categories:
· A rating of 70 percent service-related disability as a military veteran;
· Being a spouse or registered domestic partner of an active duty or a member of the US Armed Forces;
· Working in Washington under a non-immigrant visa for temporary workers; and,
· Working in the state but having a permanent address and residency in another state.
The last two were sorely needed. There were people who were being forced to pay into it while being unable to benefit from it at the same time. At least that loophole was closed, but there are other problems with this that should be addressed before it goes into effect.
I got the info above, by the way, from an HR person at my agency. (Being a state employee means they get this info out to us pretty quickly.)
The web site for the WA Cares Fund has this info as well now, but not in quite as much detail:
Yeah, I got it too. Too busy today to do more than glance at it.
The SSA includes declining fertility rates. I’d think if fertility rates were offset by immigration rates, fertility rates wouldn’t be an issue.
As in many countries, the population in the United States is graying…In 1950, 8 percent of the total population was aged 65 or older. That share was 12 percent in 2005 and is projected to reach 23 percent by 2080. The elderly population will have more than doubled as a percentage of the total population in just over 100 years. At the same time, the working-age population will have shrunk, from 60 percent in 2005 to 54 percent in 2080.
These demographic changes can be traced to declining fertility rates as well as increasing life expectancies. At the start of the baby boom (1946), the average number of children born to a woman in her lifetime was 2.86. By the end of the baby boom (1964), that number had increased to 3.17. The fertility rate was much lower in the postboomer years, although the rate has increased since 1980 and is projected to decline slightly in the coming decades
[bolding mine]
Opting out is good, but it’s only part of the problem. The other main problem is the benefits suck. I think the maximum lifetime benefit is $36,500. That’s about 5 months for my mother’s assisted living situation.
I’m a bleeding heart liberal. I don’t bitch about my taxes. I support universal health care, and the ACA. Hell, I’m even open to that universal basic income thing. But for some reason this program really rubs me the wrong way. I feel like a right winger when I say the government has no business telling everyone that they must have long term care insurance. It would be different I suppose if they said we’ll tax everyone and everyone will have all their long term care needs paid for by the state. That would be a nice social program.
There’s a term for “knowingly saying something that isn’t true because it sounds better”…
But look how much you’re putting into it.
Let’s say you work from age 18 to age 68 (50 years). And say you make $60,000 a year. (I know it’s not realistic for income to be that steady for so long, and $60,000 is a lot to make at 18, but it’s a hypothetical.)
Over that 50 year period you’ve made $3,000,000. You pay $0.58 of every $100 you make, or $0.0058 per dollar. $3,000,000 multiplied by 0.0058 comes out to $17,400. So you can get more than twice what you paid into it. That’s pretty good.
Even if you made $120,000 a year every year for 50 years, you are only paying $34,800 into it, and you still can get back more than you paid into it.
The way I look at it, even if the benefits are small, they are better than nothing and what they’re taking from everyone’s income is so small that people will barely notice it.
That’s why I said before that when I crunched the numbers, I realized that it wouldn’t be that bad. I still got a different and better plan when the opportunity came up, though, so my wife and I are eligible for better benefits from a private company. But if that wasn’t available, I wouldn’t mind what the state is doing.
Yes, there are a couple: ‘Rhetoric’ and ‘metaphor’.
I was thinking more along the lines of “bullshit” or “propaganda”.
I strongly disagree with this, too. This is basically the Lump of Labor fallacy, which suggests that there’s some fixed amount of work and if we have too many laborers they’ll have to split a fixed amount of remuneration. But that’s clearly not true. The economy is not static, and if old people can do useful work then they will make us all better off by doing so.
The reason for SS is that there comes a point when old people can’t do useful work (particularly if their line of work is something requiring physical labor) and we don’t want them to starve.
Cite? Here are some of FDR’s talks on Social Security for reference. I haven’t read them all, but I don’t see anything in there about convincing people to retire to boost the wages of the remaining employed. His economic advisors made some mistakes, but I’m pretty sure they didn’t fall for the Lump of Labor.
I think I learned about this in high school (?)
The one thing which has remained true about Social Security since the 1970s when I became aware of it, is that its insolvency was mysteriously timed to the arrival of nuclear fusion: it’s always 20 to 50 years away, but most assuredly inevitable. 
That is interesting. I did a little reading and there were a lot of issues with the Townsend plan (it’s clear Townsend did not have the macroeconomic chops to make a functional national insurance plan), but it was quite popular and was clearly a sort of precursor to Social Security. And it’s quite possible that enough people believe in Lump of Labor that they thought that providing an incentive to people to retire was a positive effect of Social Security (it’s not!).